December 27, 2005

Opacity.us offers galleries of images of modern ruins. Insane asylums, abandoned private schools, industrial sites, and the splendor of Bannerman Castle. I love the Gothic, gloomy spaces revealed. The site has many, many photographs.

The Falling Sand game: a calming, appealing browser game that's more complex and open-ended than it appears at first glance. I keep tweaking values and experimenting with interactions. This is great on the Tablet PC, too:It reminds me of the classic Soda Constructor of yore.

I spent a few hours back in Ann Arbor today. One of my favorite bookshops, Shaman Drum, delighted me for an hour of bibliophilic immersion. Am now drinking coffee and absorbing WiFi from the old Espresso Royale, which was one of the first coffeehouses in this town, once upon a time.

We're in Michigan for a few days, visiting friends and family.

It's always strange, rich, defamiliarizing, comforting, upsetting to return here. I spent more than one-half of my life in the state of Michigan, including a full stint in higher education at the University. Ceredwyn and I were married here, and both of our children born in Michigan. I dream about certain buildings, city blocks, landscapes. Revisiting is revising, literally.

A story about funeral home misdeeds appeared in Wired, of all places. It's bad enough to mislead customers about what one is doing with the remains they hand over, but much worse to lie about the medical condition of those remains when selling them for medical re-use (!).The Telegraph has more on the specific misappropriation of Alistair Cooke's remains.

December 21, 2005

Another piece on sexuality and technoculture appeared in this Sunday's New York Times. The focus: children and teens as camwhores. It tells the story of one boy who spent years doing various things via cam (and off) for money. The reporter then helped him get out of the scene, and become a federal witness.

As others have noted, Eichenwald's account is better than most on this topic. But there are still issues of interest to those following the scary/forbidden/dark internet meme.

There's the perennial slippery language issue. The subjects, including the main one, veer between being children, boys, teens, adolescents, and minors. The article doesn't distinguish.Then we see the occasional misplaced agency, as in a sentence where people don't create communities:

But the Internet has created a virtual community where they can readily communicate and reinforce their feelings...

The article also brackets out other forces playing key roles in camwhoredom. For instance, consumerism doesn't appear as a topic, despite repeated evocations of wish lists and purchases. The sometimes agonizing complexity of teen sexuality doesn't appear (!), leaving the weird impression of older predators soiling innocents bereft of desires. (NB: I'm not justifying them, but wanting to be precise, here)

One brief bit appears to tantalize. Justin's schoolmates apparently taunted and beat him, once they learned something of his camlife. What did they learn? What was the content of their taunts - homophobia? Indeed, the continuum of same-sex - bisexual - heterosexual desire is hinted at, but never addressed. Once more, cyberspace summons sexual complexity, which can be readily compressed into narratives of crime. Not to mention the Oedipal/nuclear family romance of the article's conclusion.

This Slate piece is worth reading. It begins by critiquing the article from a journalism ethics perspective, then includes email exchanges between the two reporters.